The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories by Ben Monopoli Read Free Book Online

know...the finality
of it got to me or something. ...I don’t know why I just told you that........
    Boydyboy: because it was bugging you Ollie. why do you think i tell you all the shit that bugs me? it helps to tell.
    OwOw0: Yeah, it does....... I guess it’s a minor thing, a mattress.
But I didn’t want to let it hit the floor when I was carrying it through the
garage, like I didn’t want to get it dirty... I was like, Careful careful . Then seeing it just laying there in the leaves...
It was the worst thing, Boyd.
    Boydyboy: i understand

 
    Online—when at any moment we could be slapped with a
disconnect that could take an hour or more to fix—I ached for him. I
imagined us as two isolated outposts connected by a fragile wire in a frozen
void. I felt like I was reaching out, saying, Still there? And each word could be the last.

 
    OwOw0: i know you understand Boyd. that’s
why you’re my best friend.

 
    ***

 
    After I hit a telephone pole on early-morning ice in
November—probably because I was driving on three hours’ sleep and a
learner’s permit—Boyd drove me to school for a week while my car went in
for a new bumper. Bleary from our late nights online, we rode together those
mornings side by side silently, almost silently, as though we hardly knew each
other, like a cabbie and his passenger. The connection we were forging online
didn’t seem to be carrying over into real life. It made me wonder how much of
what I thought was building between us was genuine and how much I was
manufacturing. In chat sessions words were just words until I filtered them through desperation and hope.
    In real life, when I could see the holes in his corduroys
and hear his sleepy voice in the mornings, when I had Boyd Wren, we didn’t talk
about grandmothers. We didn’t talk about dreams or how we were feeling. Instead
I would say things like, “I’ve really been getting into the band R.E.M. lately.”
“Cool,” he would say, his hair slicked back, still wet, if it was the morning; cowlicky again if it was the afternoon. “Yeah they’re
pretty cool,” I would say. That was how we talked in person. The rest I would
save for the night, when I had Boydyboy.

 
    OwOw0: honestly though i think this band
is changing my fuckin life Boyd
    Boydyboy: REM? Do tell..
    OwOw0: have you heard the song Losing My Religion?
    Boydyboy: of Course. i think every one
has heard that song.
    OwOw0: i guess i had too because it was familiar but i never thought
about it. but it came on the radio whlie I was
driving around last week and it almost made me cry for some reason. the lyrics.
he has something to confess and he can’t say it. I almost had to pull over. it
was like, wow. i went and bought the album
immediately. when i listen it makes me feel like my
body is being opened up and Michael Stipe (the singer) is personally nursing my
wounded soul
    Boydyboy: “deepness follows”
    OwOw0: Hehe what?
    Boydyboy: joking. you know the REM song Sweetness Follows. haha
    OwOw0: I just have the 1 CD so far. Out OF Time. I’ll have to get
that one!
    Boydyboy: why is your soul wounded Ollie?
    OwOwo : haha what?
    Boydyboy: you said your soul is wounded, why is it woudned ?
    OwOwo : i dunno just stuff I guess.
    Boydyboy: “stuff”?
    OwOwo : just some stuff I guess.
    Boydyboy: hhmm . well get the CD with
Sweetness Follows, it’s good. and pay attention to it. maybe it can help to you
know yourself better than you do now.
    OwOw0: you think it can?
    Boydyboy: i feel it will.

 
    Sometimes he was cryptic like that—and god I could
pack so much hope into anything cryptic. The more IMs we sent back and forth,
the farther I felt we were breaking from real life, into a place that roiled
with secret possibility. What if Boyd was like me? I knew there were others.
What if he was one? What if Boyd felt the things I felt? What if Boyd was
interested in my wounds because he had them too?

 
    OwOw0: hmm I feel like i know mysefl too well sometimes.